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I just want to say: "Hello! You are doing really great job. Insane community, you are so friendly everyone. I am glad that I am here."

Now, let's go back to main subject.

I would like to get to know Unix-like systems better. Until now I was a ussual Windows user slightly interested in computer. My first time Unix-like experience was when I tried OpenBSD (Really tough one for beginner, but I enjoyed it. Security is very interesting topic). After a few miserable days in OpenBSD world (I couldn't get anything working there) I decided to start from beginning and choose distro which is friendly for beginner. "Mint"

Before installation I need a small help. Can you tell me optional settings for partition scheme? How much for /root, /swap, /home...?I know there are a lot of threads about this, but I want to hear common solution of experienced linux users. I have HP notebook 4GB RAM, 500GB Hard disk.

I am looking forward to your answers. I apologize for my newbie question and maybe even for my written English (English is not my native language).

/swap - same as my RAM, which I believe is the recommended amount/root - 10 GB/home - whatever was left on the drive (I believe it was 18 GB)

With 10 GB for root, I haven't run into any disk space issues yet, but I don't plan on using more than one desktop environment. I've added the KDE game pack and some other assorted programs and added one of the newer kernels and believe I have near 5 GB left. I'll check when I get home.

I only used the smallish 18 GB for /home, because the system is single user and I didn't want to give up my Vista partition quite yet. I haven't moved my music collection over yet, but it's only 3 GB any way. I have a Blu-Ray player hooked to my pretty sweet TV, so I don't plan on ripping movies to this computer, so I doubt I'll need much more space that that. But probably at Christmas time I will get a new laptop with Win7 on it and dedicate this laptop to Mint fully and start to explore the multimedia capabilities.

I don't see many recommendations for more partitions than that anymore. Used to be you would see guides insisting you have a /var, /usr, /bin, etc partition. Somebody will correct me if I am wrong, I'm sure.

I like poetry, long walks on the beach and poking dead things with a stick.

10 gigs is a lot if you don't have much hard drive space. I have mine set to 6.5GB and it still has 2 gigs free. I recommend you run this when you have Mint installed. You can get ~500MB freed up of space.

If you are doing a lot of computationally intensive things, compiling, converting formats, etc., use the 64 bit version. For things memory intensive and normal desktop use stay with the 32 bit version.

Fred

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.

Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on the menu. Liberty is an armed lamb protesting the electoral outcome. A Republic negates the need for an armed protest.